On Aug 10, 2018, the EC Times published a work by Peter Suciu (The Internet's Truth vs. Fake News Showdown) in which Suciu justified the platform takedown of Alex Jones' Infowars by Facebook, Google/Youtube, Spotify and Apple.The work by Suciu is a bad attempt at persuasion as Suciu fails to report the facts. In effect, Suciu has engaged in fake news, that is, opinion journalism masquerading as news reporting.
In his hatchet job, Suciu has labeled Jones' political commentary as "conspiracy theories" and "purposeful disinformation" while peppering the work with quotes from a guy from a digital risk management firm, from a social media consultant, from a representative of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and from an egghead professor from a lower ranked university.
For those who do not know, Alex Jones produces bombastic commentary on the intersection of politics and financial power whether in the United States and Europe. Jones does not report news. However, sometimes, because of his commentary, Jones becomes the news.
Jones began his career through community access television and from there, went into radio and quickly became syndicated. As the commercialization of the Internet took off, Jones offered his political commentary content for sale by subscription. Jones leveraged two news aggregation sites, which he produced, to do so: Infowars.com and Prisonplanet.com.
As YouTube became prominent, Jones began releasing video recordings of his daily radio show on YouTube. As well, as the practice of calling mp3 recordings podcasts became something, Jones ported the audio portions of his video recordings to podcast hosts like Apple and Spotify. In doing both, Jones pivoted to selling other products and eliminated the paid subscription to access his daily radio/video simulcast show.
Jones believes he has stumbled upon a vast interconnection of power expressed through politics and media to keep those at the top, well on top. Whether this is a well-orchestrated plan and thus a vast conspiracy or merely spontaneous organization as the result many individuals pursuing self-interest and often conspiring with like-minded individuals is open for debate.
Clearly, executives of Facebook, Apple, Google, and Spotify, now known as FAGS in the meme wars world, have worked in concert as all banned Jones on the same day and thus all must have met behind closed doors to decide this action. Their action is the definition of conspiracy.
In his lame attempt at persuasion, Suciu has tried to deceive his readers by implying that because this is not a First Amendment issue (Congress has a duty to make no laws prohibiting speech whether expressed or published, whether against the government or on any matter), the action has a legal basis. As Suciu put it, "Neither fake news nor purposeful disinformation would be protected by the First Amendment, in any case."
Ironically (meaning Suciu lacks self-awareness), Suciu wrote,
"If Jones merely had offered his opinions, rather than presenting his content as facts, he might not be treated any differently than the plethora of talking heads who appear on various cable news channels each evening."
Yet, anyone with an IQ above 125 who happens upon CNN, MSNBC, PBS Newshour, CBS News, ABC News, or NBC News, at random, will be hit with little more than opinion journalism heavily layered upon cherry-picked facts. In short, all national broadcast TV news channels produce little more than Fake News.
All TV news is entertainment by definition. TV firms produce news to sell advertising. To get as many viewers as possible, TV firm execs have become experts at editing news content to produce the visceral effects in viewers much in the same way that Hollywood directors and cinematographers seek to entertain viewers and produce visceral effects in their viewers.
On-air "personalities" who read teleprompters are not journalists. Journalists are people who live in places and write their observations (aka journal their experiences) in foreign lands. Reporters are those who show up at incidents and give eyewitness accounts of what is either happening or what has happened only moments before.
Sure, the producers of TV news gather a few facts, but then they spin a story to push their desire to control each individual mind in order to create what is known as public opinion. Every story is edited. Even the images are purposefully selected. Commentators on mass media have known this since before the advent of television.
The FAGS have relied upon a lose interpretation of Title V of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (aka Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996) as codified in 47 U.S.C. § 230(c)(1) in which interactive computer service (ICS) is indemnified from from liability for providers and users of an who publish information provided by third-party users.
Specifically, 47 U.S.C. § 230(c)(1) states:
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
The sitting Congress at the time passed § 230 to give ICSs protection from lawsuits for any and every piece of content shared through their servers by private individuals using their servers such as illegal child pornography. Congress traded that protection in exchange for the ICSs to develop mechanisms to restrict categories of harmful content like child pornography.
The immunity given in 47 U.S.C. § 230(c)(1) is not intended to give exces of ICSs editorial control against individuals. So in the case of Jones, ICSs are obligated to ban all producers of political commentary because the intent of the law is to ban categories of content and not the producers thereof. Yet, CNN, MSNBC, PBS Newshour, CBS News, ABC News, or NBC News are readily accessible on the FAGS plaforms.
Since execs claim to be operators of interactive computer services, they claim that banning individuals is acceptable practice. In effect, the FAGS have engaged in editorial control over someone whom affects the political chances of their favored politicians, Democrats.
Jones and others like him have grounds for lawsuits against the FAGS and likely would prevail in court since execs of the FAGS have failed to ban producers of classes of content and instead have banned individual producers of content they deem to be enemies of the Democratic Party or their favored legislative goals such as open borders or massive legalized immigration.
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